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But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations? Here surely
is a contradiction; on the one side the Soul is above all guilt;
on the other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its
expiation; it is doomed to the lower world, it passes from body
to body.
We may take either view at will: they are easily reconciled.
When we tell of the sinless Soul, we make Soul and Essential-Soul
one and the same: it is the simple unbroken Unity.
By the Soul subject to sin we indicate a groupment, we include
that other, that phase of the Soul which knows all the states and
passions: the Soul in this sense is compound, all-inclusive: it
falls under the conditions of the entire living experience: this
compound it is that sins; it is this, and not the other, that
pays penalty.
It is in this sense that we read of the Soul: "We saw it as those
others saw the sea-god Glaukos." "And," reading on, "if we mean
to discern the nature of the Soul we must strip it free of all
that has gathered about it, must see into the philosophy of it,
examine with what Existences it has touch and by kinship to what
Existences it is what it is."
Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is another and the Expiator
yet another. The retreat and sundering, then, must be not from
this body only, but from every alien accruement. Such accruement
takes place at birth; or rather birth is the coming-into-being of
that other [lower] phase of the Soul. For the meaning of birth
has been indicated elsewhere; it is brought about by a descent of
the Soul, something being given off by the Soul other than that
actually coming down in the declension.
Then the Soul has let this image fall? And this declension is it
not certainly sin?
If the declension is no more than the illuminating of an object
beneath, it constitutes no sin: the shadow is to be attributed
not to the luminary but to the object illuminated; if the object
were not there, the light could cause no shadow.
And the Soul is said to go down, to decline, only in that the
object it illuminates lives by its life. And it lets the image
fall only if there be nothing near to take it up; and it lets it
fall, not as a thing cut off, but as a thing that ceases to be:
the image has no further being when the whole Soul is looking
toward the Supreme.
The poet, too, in the story of Hercules, seems to give this image
separate existence; he puts the shade of Hercules in the lower
world and Hercules himself among the gods: treating the hero as
existing in the two realms at once, he gives us a twofold
Hercules.
It is not difficult to explain this distinction. Hercules was a
hero of practical virtue. By his noble serviceableness he was
worthy to be a God. On the other hand, his merit was action and
not the Contemplation which would place him unreservedly in the
higher realm. Therefore while he has place above, something of
him remains below.
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